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2017/02/28 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Science

Two metal detecting friends have found a hoard of superb iron age gold jewellery after returning to a Staffordshire field where they previously found nothing and became so bored that they gave up the hobby and turned to fishing for 20 years. The four iron age gold torcs – three collars and a bracelet-sized piece, including two made of twisted gold wire, two with trumpet shaped finials and one with beautiful Celtic ornament – are of international importance. The pieces were made in present-day Germany or France, possibly in the third or fourth century BC and, according to Julia Farley of the British Museum, are some of the oldest examples of iron age gold, and of Celtic ornament, ever found in Britain. They could have arrived through trade or on the neck and arms of an extremely wealthy immigrant.

2016/09/30 by Dalya Alberge
Originally published in The Guardian Science

A 3,000-year-old complete pressed flower is among the “absolutely jaw-dropping” late bronze age finds unearthed in Lancashire. The thistle flower appears to have been deliberately placed inside the hollow end of an axe handle and buried with other weapons, jewellery and ornaments, many in virtually pristine condition. Other axe handles in the hoard had been filled with hazelnuts, as part of a ritual offering. Dr Ben Roberts, a lecturer at Durham University and the British Museum’s former curator of European bronze age collections, described the pressed flower as unique for a votive offering of its time. These sockete…

2016/06/22 by Steven Morris
Originally published in The Guardian UK news

The discovery of a few muddy coins in a Devon paddock by a pair of amateur metal detector enthusiasts has led to the redrawing of the boundary of the Roman empire in south-west Britain. Previously it had been thought that Ancient Rome’s influence did not stretch beyond Exeter but the find has resulted in a major archaeological dig that has unearthed more coins, a stretch of Roman road and the remnants of vessels from France and the Mediterranean once full of wine, olive oil and garum – fish sauce. The far south-west of Britain has long been seen as an area that clung to its independence but the discovery at Ipplepen, near Newton Abbot, 20 miles south-west of Exeter, has led to the conclusion that Roman influence was strongly felt here. Related:

2016/03/13 by Dalya Alberge
Originally published in The Observer Science

A significant early bronze age burial site, believed to date from 2500BC, has been discovered near Morecambe Bay. Grave goods could include objects ranging from daggers and ceramic vessels to jewellery, textiles and material such as amber, jet and gold. The site will be excavated in July. Archaeologists were alerted to its existence by Matthew Hepworth, a nurse, who unearthed a well-preserved bronze age chisel using a metal detector. Ben Roberts, a lecturer in later prehistory at Durham University and the British Museum’s former curator for European bronze age collections, said: “The potential is huge because untouched, undiscovered sites are very rare indeed. What’s really special about our site is that no one knew about it before … The barrow appears to be intact and it’s pretty substantial.” Most bronze age burial sites have been destroyed by ploughing or historical looting. The Morecambe Bay find is all the more significant due to …

2016/03/01 by Haroon Siddique
Originally published in The Guardian Science

The remains of an Anglo-Saxon island have been uncovered in Lincolnshire in a significant find that has yielded an unusually wide array of artefacts. The island, once home to a Middle Saxon settlement, was found at Little Carlton near Louth, Lincolnshire, by archaeologists from the University of Sheffield after a discovery by a metal detectorist. Graham Vickers came across a silver stylus, an ornate writing tool dating back to the 8th century, in a disturbed plough field. He reported his find and subsequently unearthed hundreds more artefacts, recording their placement with GPS, thus enabling archaeologists to build up a picture of the settlement below. The artefacts include another 20 styli, about 300 dress pins and a huge number of sceattas – coins from the 7th-8th centuries – as well as a unusual small lead tablet bearing the female Anglo-Saxon name “Cudberg”. Students from the university later found significant quantities of Middle …

2015/12/23 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Culture

A very small treasure hoard – a handful of tiny fragments of beautifully worked Tudor gold – has been harvested from a muddy stretch of the Thames foreshore over a period of years by eight different metal detectorists. The pieces all date from the early 16th century, and the style of the tiny pieces of gold is so similar that Kate Sumnall, an archaeologist, believes they all came from the disastrous loss of one fabulous garment, possibly a hat snatched off a passenger’s head by a gust of wind at a time when the main river crossings were the myriad ferry boats. Such metal objects, including aglets – metal tips for laces – beads and studs, originally had a practical purpose as garment fasteners but by the early 16th century were being worn in gold as high-status ornaments, making costly fabrics such as velvet and furs even more ostentatious. Contemporary portraits, including one in the National Portrait Gallery of

2015/12/10 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Science

A hoard of Viking silver that casts new light on Alfred the Great and the one-time ally he virtually obliterated from history has been found by a metal detectorist in a field in Oxfordshire. The hoard, described when it arrived at the British Museum as “a greasy haggis with bits of treasure sticking out at the corners”, was buried in the late 870s, the period in which the hit television series Last Kingdom is set. It may have been the hastily concealed wealth of a Viking conscious of imminent regime change after the defeat of the invaders by Alfred the Great at the battle of Edington in 878. The discovery in October, on farmland near Watlington, may be worth a small fortune to the retired advertising executive who helped excavate it on his 60th birthday, and to the farmer who owns the land. As well as a scrap of chopped up gold – the first found in a Viking hoard in Britain – silver arm rings and ingots, it includes at least 180 silver coins, some frag…

2015/12/03 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in theguardian.com Art and design

The discarded scraps of ancient lives, found by metal detectorists and sold for tiny sums on eBay have been transformed by jeweller Romilly Saumarez-Smith into miniature works of art. The modest treasures include a button that dropped off a garment 1,000 years ago, a thimble almost worn through with use, rings with gaping empty mounts instead of their original precious gems, an Anglo-Saxon stud with just a gleaming trace left of its gilding, and medieval dress pins shed into the Thames by some poor ferry passenger who must have arrived on the far bank a little dishevelled. Gold Caddis Earrings 2012: Tudor bronze buttons; 18 carat gold.

2015/01/02 by Mark Wallace
Originally published in theguardian.com Opinion

My fingers are still cracked from the cold of a clear Monday in the Kent countryside. Wrapped up in numerous layers, my friend James and I were out with thermos flasks, shovels and metal detectors to explore the past hidden beneath the frozen turf. Despite the news of a record-breaking find of 5,251 Anglo-Saxon coins, metal detecting is not a sexy hobby. The geeks of Mackenzie Crook’s recent sitcom, Detectorists, are all too close to real life – and yes, we dig up more ring pulls than ancient coins. But you can keep your parkour, your sourdough baking or your street dance – they’ve got nothing o…

2014/08/29 by Dave Crisp
Originally published in theguardian.com Opinion

Yesterday, a treasure hunt began on a Folkestone beach where a German artist, Michael Sailstorfer, has buried £10,000 of bullion – 30 bars of 24-carat gold – as part of an arts festival. People started to descend with metal detectors, spades, forked sticks and anything else they thought might help, and on Thursday night a family found the very first bar. Is this art? It’s not for me to say. I can’t tell a Picasso from a potato, but it’s certainly given my hobby a boost. I live in deepest Wiltshire, and can assure this talented artist that there are plenty of places around here where he would be welcome to practice his chosen art form. Four years ago, I was lucky enough to uncover the world’s

2014/06/13 by Alan Sykes
Originally published in theguardian.com UK news

In the 1560s Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the Northumberland coast near Berwick, was something of an armed camp close to the front line of the defence against Scotland. After Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, stones from Lindisfarne Priory were used to build a small castle and other fortifications for the harbour. So the garrison seems an unlikely place for not one but two of Britain's greatest treasure discoveries. Perhaps an officer stationed on Lindisfarne was careless, forgetful or unlucky, as two small hoards of coins dating from shortly after the castle was built in 1550 have been found near a watercourse by the same house. The first collection came to light in 1962, and consists of 50 silver 16th-century English and Scottish coins. It now belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle, and is housed in the

2014/03/21 by Becky Barnicoat
Originally published in The Guardian Life and style

On a morning tube full of commuters, I am the only person in wellies. At London Bridge, I break away from the suits filing towards the City, and make for the river. Moments later I'm down on my knees, sifting through rusty metal and rocks in the mud. Office life feels very far away. I am here to learn how to beachcomb with Steve Brooker of the Society of London Mudlarks. "Mudlarks" were originally Victorian children who scavenged on the Thames for coal, bones or wood to sell. Now they're amateur archaeologists who search the shore for artifacts turned up by the river. To gain a mudlark's licence, you have to put in two years as a beachcomber, recording your finds with the Museum of London. But beachcombing is a skill, too, and by learning the basics you are much more likely to discover something of interest – and take your first step towards becoming a mudlark. When and where to go We start on the beach …

2014/01/16 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Culture

When three friends first saw a great lump of silvery metal just below the surface of a Dorset field, they thought they'd hit a metal pipe and, because it was so shiny, that it must be aluminium. Stuart McLeod, the primary school headteacher who had started metal detecting a few weeks earlier, had only found horseshoes until then. He yearned to find a good early coin, like the fistfuls regularly unearthed by his veteran metal-detecting friends Stephen Tharp, a retired chef, and joiner Shawn Miller. It took the three of them to ease their find out of its pit in the ground. It turned out to be one of the most spectacular treasure finds of 2012, 1kg of silver fashioned into a massive jug.

2013/10/11 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Culture

A spectacular stash of Viking treasure – more than 200 pieces of silver including beautiful arm rings, brooches, silver ingots, and a battered, misspelt coin that revealed a previously unknown Viking ruler – will go on display this month near where it was found by a metal-detector enthusiast two years ago. The hoard was found packed into a lead container inches below the surface of a field in Lancashire. But whether it would be displayed in the county where it was found had seemed in doubt in the economic climate. Now, though, Lancashire county museum service has raised the £110,000 that it needed to acquire the third-largest Viking hoard found in the UK, with the help of a £45,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £33,000 from the Art Fund charity, plus other grants and local donations. It was found in 2011 by Darren Webster, a stonemason who was out with the metal detector his wife had given him for Christmas. The field, on the out…

2012/12/03 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian UK news

When the battered metal helmet turned up in a field on the outskirts of Canterbury, the archaeologists had to peer at it carefully to be sure it wasn't a relic from a careless American GI in the second world war — albeit one with eccentric tastes, since it contained a mass of burned human bone. The helmet, revealed for the first time as last year's haul of archaeological finds by metal detectors was unveiled at the British Museum, is in fact an artefact from a much earlier conflict. It is an exceptionally rare Iron Age Celtic helmet from the time of the first invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar, who landed only a few miles away on the Kent coast. The bones haven't yet been analysed, but the presumption is that they are those of the helmet's owner, who must have been a warrior — and could in those complicated times have been a Gaul fighting either by Caesar's side, or with the defending Britons. It is one of only a handful of such h…

2011/12/14 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Science

Evidence of a previously unknown Viking king has been discovered in a hoard of silver found by a metal detectorist, stashed in a lead box in a field in Lancashire. The 201 pieces of silver including beautiful arm rings, worn by Viking warriors, were found on the outskirts of Silverdale, a village near the coast in north Lancashire, by Darren Webster, using the metal detector his wife gave him as a Christmas present. It adds up to more than 1kg of silver, probably stashed for safe keeping around AD900 at a time of wars and power struggles among the Vikings of northern England, and never recovered. Airdeconut – thought to be the Anglo Saxon coin maker's struggle to get to grips with the Viking name Harthacnut – was found on one of the coins in the hoard. The Airdeconut coin also reveals that within a generation of the Vikings starting to colonise permanent settlements in Britain in the 870s – instead of coming as summer raiders – their kings h…

2011/11/08 by Martin Wainwright
Originally published in theguardian.com UK news

You're not really anything these days if you haven't got a Hoard of your own, which is why Leeds needs to raise a few thousand pounds very quickly. If we fail, the city will lose one of the most interesting treasures to come out of our local ground since the Victorian heyday of Roman finds and the bones of ancient hippopotami which once sensibly favoured the sunny swamps of what is now Armley. What am I on about? The Leeds or West Yorkshire Hoard. Yes, we have got one at last and I went to a very interesting evening of talks about it at the city Museum just the other night. The city's curator of archaeology Kat Baxter and a Leeds university mediaevalist, Dr Alaric Hall, did a marvellous double-act and we were allowed to…

2011/06/20 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Culture

A scrap of twisted silver found a few weeks ago by a metal detector in Lancashire will take its place among masterpieces of medieval art at the British Museum, in an exhibition opening this week of the bejewelled shrines made to hold the relics of saints and martyrs. The badge made of silver found by Paul King, a retired logistics expert, is a humble object to earn a place in an exhibition called Treasures of Heaven, but it is unique. It will sit among gold and silver reliquaries studded with gems the size of thumbnails – or the sockets from which they were wrenched by thieves – once owned by emperors, popes and princes. The badge, the only one of its kind ever found in Britain, provides a link 500 years ago between this corner of rural Lancashire and the great pilgrimage sites of mainland Europe. It shows one of the companions of St Ursula, one of the most popular mystical legends of medieval Europe. She was said to be a British princess who sailed with 11…

2011/05/25 by Maev Kennedy
Originally published in The Guardian Culture

Amateurs using metal detectors have found record amounts of golden treasure and priceless scraps of history across England, according to an annual report from the British Museum. All the items were reported to archaeologists under a scheme which the museum's director, Neil MacGregor, called "quite unique in Europe". MacGregor recently presented the successful Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects. The report shows that 2010 was an exceptional year, with 859 treasure discoveries (up by 10%) and 90,146 other finds (up 36%). The finds are helping draw new maps of invasion, settlement, trade and warfare across thousands of years of English history. All were reported through the treasure and portable …

2011/02/09 by Roger Bland
Originally published in The Guardian Science

Geoff Egan, who has died of coronary thrombosis aged 59, was the leading UK expert in medieval and later small finds, and pioneered liaison between archaeologists and the "mudlarks" who search for finds on the Thames foreshore. Digging in thick mud against the tide, mudlarks have retrieved a fascinating trove of metal artefacts left by generations of Londoners on the riverbanks. Mudlarks were once shunned by many professional archaeologists, who deplored what they saw as their unscientific methods of retrieval, but many developed great expertise and some, such as Tony Pilson, donated their collections to the Museum of London and the British Museum. Geoff had done some mudlarking himself before he became a professional archaeologist. Together with his colleague Hazel Forsyth, in 2005 he published Toys, Trifles and Trinkets, detailing Pilson's collection. This pioneering work studied a class of artefact (children's metal toys made betwe…